Denialism.com

Monday, April 9, 2007

They just can't help themselves

A good example of why denialists are cranks and not just representing an alternative viewpoint, is when they expand into other fields they use the same methodology to attack. I give you Uncommon Descent arguing against anthropomorphic climate change.

As record breaking cold sweeps the U.S. this Easter weekend, plunging temperatures 20 degrees below average for early April, nary a mention of global warming can be found in the news. Talk about putting a cold damper on Friday's release of the 2007 IPCC report on so-called global warming, the timing couldn’t have been better. Is someone trying to tell us something by making it snow in southern Texas in April just as the IPCC report is released? You can bet your bottom dollar that if the temperature in the U.S. was 20 degrees ABOVE normal we’d be hearing plenty from the global warming alarmists but they are mysteriously silent now. I can’t find a single major news source carried by Google News mentioning the record cold and global warming in the same article. Gee, I wonder why?

Ok. Does anyone else see the salient idiocy? It's pretty obvious to me, and it's a recurring problem with many of the lay global warming deniers. Quite simply, it is the idea these jackasses have that they can stick their hand out the window, feel it's cold, and then pontificate on a global phenomenon. Really, you have to be pretty ill-informed to fall for this kind of ridiculously simplistic attack on global warming, and in all the "off-topic" attacks on global warming from Dave Scott at UC, it's either this drivel, calling Al Gore fat, or suggesting his heating bill has something to do with climate science.

This is why it's denialism folks. There is no real content here. We don't have a real argument, real data, or real facts from the denialist opposition. We just get snide remarks, confusing analogies, and misrepresentation of the debate. Global warming doesn't mean it can't be cold ever. It just means over a given year, globally, temperatures will be on average warmer.

Labels: global warming denialism, uncommon descent

4 Comments:

Tim said...

To be fair, he actually has a tiny little corn-like nugget of a point buried among the usual denialist poo, and it is this:

The mainstream media does in fact bear a generous portion of the blame for this denialist strategy by shrieking about global warming whenever temperatures rise, without giving proper scientific context.

You're right that overall trends are what should be explained. I admit that even I'm simplifying here just for the sake of an example, but here in Maryland we're having the coldest April since the 70's, but that doesn't counteract the fact that we also had the warmest January ever recorded.

Of course the patterns are going to be a lot more complex than that, but most of the time we don't even get the above minimal context in news reporting. Just report on the immediate temperature, give the obvious attribution to global warming (warmer=warming! HURR), and then move on to Paris Hilton's latest wacky antics.

The dumbed-down modern media is terrified of context, nuance and detail in its reportage, lest the remainder of its dwindling audience change the channel to "Ow! My Balls!" But people have to know that it's the overall worldwide trends we're looking at; bizarre localized fluctuations are expected and predicted, but you can't deny the retreating polar ice sheets, melting mountain snow-caps, rising ocean temperatures, etc. happening all over the globe.

April 9, 2007 10:35 AM,

Tim said...

Not that this absolves the denialists, of course; they don't typically go for the mainstream media either (being "too liberal"). But it gives them ammunition to use against less-informed people who are still on the fence about global warming.

They're still losing the debate in the public eye, though, which gives me hope for humanity.

April 9, 2007 10:46 AM,

Mark said...

I know, every time I hear one of those idiot readers say something like that I just cringe.

Just the basic inability to distinguish weather from climate is really sad, and a sign that whoever it is just has no idea what they're talking about.

April 9, 2007 11:28 AM,

Ted said...

The dumbed-down modern media is terrified of context, nuance and detail in its reportage, lest the remainder of its dwindling audience change the channel to "Ow! My Balls!"

Which reminds me of an observation that JS made:

As I always like to say, I think the US media does a FANTASTIC job. Day after day after day, they do outstanding work.

By this, of course, I mean they do a fantastic job at what they exist to do: make as much money as possible for their owners. True, they do a horrible job at informing people about the world, but you should expect that. A chainsaw does a fantastic job at cutting things in half. But you shouldn't expect it to brush your teeth very well.

And this is why the media needs to be bypassed in the unpleasant truth-telling tasks as much as possible.

Because brushing your teeth with a chainsaw is self-evidently bad.

April 9, 2007 10:09 PM,

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